Musaeum Clausum (Latin for Sealed Museum), also known as Bibliotheca abscondita ( Secret Library in Latin), is a tract written by Sir Thomas Browne which was first published posthumously in 1684. The tract contains short sentence descriptions of supposed, rumoured or lost books, pictures, and objects. The subtitle describes the tract as an inventory of remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. Its date is unknown: however, an event from the year 1673 is cited.
Influence from Rabelais
Like his
Pseudodoxia Epidemica,
Musaeum Clausum is a catalogue of doubts and queries, only this time, in a style which anticipates the 20th-century
Argentina short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges, who once declared: "To write vast books is a laborious nonsense; much better is to offer a summary as if those books actually existed."
Browne however was not the first author to engage in such fantasy. The French author Rabelais, in his epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, also penned a list of imaginary and often obscene book titles in his "Library of Pantagruel", an inventory which Browne himself alludes to in his Religio Medici.
Connections to the antiquarian collections
As the 17th-century Scientific Revolution progressed the popularity and growth of
antiquarian collections, those claiming to house highly improbable items grew. Browne was an avid collector of antiquities and natural specimens, possessing a supposed
unicorn's horn, presented to him by
Arthur Dee. Browne's eldest son Edward visited the famous scholar Athanasius Kircher, founder of the
Museo Kircherano at
Rome in 1667, whose exhibits included an engine for attempting
perpetual motion and a
Brazen head, which Kircher called his
Oraculum Delphinium. He wrote to his father of his visit to the
Jesuit priest's "closet of rarities".
Reception
The sheer volume of book-titles, pictures and objects listed in
Musaeum Clausum is testimony to Browne's fertile imagination. However, his major editors,
Simon Wilkin in the nineteenth century (1834) and Sir
Geoffrey Keynes in the twentieth (1924), summarily dismissed it. Keynes considered its humour too erudite and "not to everyone's taste".
Status as a parody
Browne's miscellaneous tract may also be read as a
parody of the rising trend of private museum collections with their
Curio cabinet of doubtful origin, and perhaps also of publications such as the so-called
Museum Hermeticum (1678), one of the last great anthologies of alchemical literature, with their divulging of near common-place alchemical concepts and symbols.
See also
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